The evasive Indo-US deal
By A K B Krishanan
THE Indo-US nuclear stalemate continues. “While there has been good co-operation, more work remains to be done to complete arrangements that will permit a civil-nuclear agreement to be finalised between the US and India,” a US embassy statement said after three days of “intensive, productive and constructive” negotiations by US Under-secretary Nicholas Burns and Indian Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon failed to resolve the main differences between the two sides on Saturday.
While Menon said the two sides “had managed to come to an understanding of most of the issues that divide us and we have removed most issues from the table,” the pivotal issues of reprocessing and cessation of co-operation in the event of another nuclear test by India remain undecided.
“There are still issues where there is a gap,” the foreign secretary acknowledged at a press conference.
Indian officials have been saying that the 123 Agreement would be fully in compliance with the agreements of July 2005. But the tortuous negotiations and persisting discord show that the US has no intention of going beyond the bounds of the shortcomings of its present legislation the Hyde Act.
The first issue of contention is the question of India conducting a test in future. India is unwilling to accept that its voluntary political commitment from 1998 not to test a nuclear weapon be converted into an obligation with legal consequences.
If the US itself were to test in the context of developing a reliable replacement warhead or China, Pakistan or another country were to test, then clearly India would not be obliged to continue its moratorium. The Hyde Act calls for immediate suspension of future co-operation and return to the US of the reactor installations and spent fuel (however impractical) and unused new fuel. There are provisions for a Presidential waiver, Congressional intervention, Presidential veto and a further two-thirds vote in the US Congress (House of Representatives and Senate) to permit co-operation.
Why should India put its trust in the goodwill of a future US president and Congress to come to its rescue? There was a way out for the US and that was to have provided for a permanent waiver, which applies in case of a nuclear weapon state. In other words, the US would have to treat India as a de facto nuclear weapon state, in this matter. The Indian negotiators have all along told their US counterparts that the voluntary moratorium cannot be converted into a binding legal obligation through the 123 Agreement.
The second issue relates to India’s right to reprocess spent fuel. The international nuclear community and our US friends are well aware of the three-stage nuclear energy programme enunciated by Homi Bhabha as early as 1955, when he presided over the first UN Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva. All successive leaders of the Indian programme have continued to support this strategy, which has, as its ultimate objective, the goal of exploiting the energy potential of the vast thorium reserves in India.
This objective will require India to build a large number of fast-breeder reactors in the second stage and then build reactors fuelled with U-233 and thorium. Reprocessing of spent fuel is an essential step in this chain of activities. India has been reprocessing spent fuel for over four decades, although initially on a small scale. If we accept the present US position, India will be able to build only light water reactors fuelled with enriched uranium (imported) and then store the spent fuel indefinitely. In the process, the fuel value of the spent fuel will remain dormant; apart from this, there will be costs and risks involved in such long term storage of highly radioactive material.
In addition, the total energy potential of global uranium reserves will be very limited if it were to be used in this ‘once-through’ mode without recycling. The US has agreed to Euratom and Japan reprocessing spent fuel of US origin and, hence, India cannot understand why it is being denied this right. But Burns is suggesting that India make more compromises to enable conclusion of the agreement.
The US administration has to find a way to accommodate fully agreements reached with India in July 2005 and March 2006. A deal is still possible provided Washington sticks to the letter and spirit of those agreements. If the only way to do so is to amend the Hyde Act, then the US should plan to do it rather than ask India to make any more compromises.
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